My boss’s family is from mainline Philadelphia. His mother’s father was a society doctor and they moved in the orbit reserved for hangers-on to the well-to-do. The family tree she chooses to remember is her mother’s from Virginia.
She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.
But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.
In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.
Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.
He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.
My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.
Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.
My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.
We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.
The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.
Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.
The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.
We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.
Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.
We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.
We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.
She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.
When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.
When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.
The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.
When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.
Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.
It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.
After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.
We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.
The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.
She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.
Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Immigration - Part 3 - Sociology
Conflict between settled communities and migratory bands is at least as old as agriculture. The two lifestyles coexist when times are good, but when times are bad, simmering conflicts flare. The usual causes are economic crises, like insect plagues or drought. Today we see the effects in Dārfūr.
What I find interesting is not the persistence of conflict, but the durability of social structures of migration in this country. They’ve been documented again and again by sociologists and historians, especially for centers of large scale movement like Boston and New York.
Still, I was surprised to discover them in my midwestern hometown. I have a city directory form 1869, one of those that lists all the heads of households with their addresses and occupations. I entered the 598 names into Excel, made guesses about ethnic origin based on surnames, and sorted them in various ways.
The town directory was about 2% Irish and 3% German a few decades after the mass migrations began with the potato famine and the revolutions of 1848.
My hometown was on the Michigan Central tracks, but the rail yards and shops were concentrated in two cities to the west and one to the east. Besides a small foundry, it had no specialized employment to distinguish it from any other farm market. It had no particular reason to draw immigrant laborers.
Mrs. E. A. Flanigan headed a family living on one of the streets of worker housing that entered the main street through an area of saloons and tobacco shops. Listed with her were two other Flanigan women, Alice and Libby, and a man, Robert. They probably were her children. Michael Flanigan lived in a local hotel.
There was no indication if she was a widow or had been abandoned. She’s the only female household head listed, and it was unusual for the directory to have listed her children. She and the girls were milliners, the resident male was a tinner, and the one in the hotel a shoemaker.
One could speculate on the economic activities of the family. After all, there must have been prostitutes and they lived in the right area. Or, they could be just what they seemed, immigrants struggling to survive doing the tedious, labor-intensive jobs others didn’t want.
Seven women in town were listed as domestics and one as a laundry woman. Two had German surnames, Ann Ballhousen and Caroline Schultz. There were eight other milliners and one woman was a seamstress. 20% to 25% immigrants in these female occupations.
The other Irish household detailed by the city directory was headed by tailor John Lynch. Four other men lived at his address: Patrick Fanning, Daniel Leary, and James Parrish, all laborers, and Patrick Braedon, a tailor. Lynch apparently took in boarders; possibly one was a partner, apprentice or employee.
Their occupations, too, were typical of the drudge work that employed so many men. Most in town were laborers. A few were merchants, including William O’Donoghue, and some were skilled tradesmen, like stone mason Francis Magennis and marble cutter John Kelly.
Edward McNally and Michael O’Donnell were saloon keepers, as were George Schwer, Blanchard Holden and James Wright. Schwer lived near the main crossroads, Wright near the Flanigans, and the others near the railroad.
Bar tenders included August Waldrougel, Henry Foster, Theodore Markle and William Nicolls. They all lived near the main crossroads, two in the hotel there. At that time, most of the people who worked or serviced a hotel had it listed as their address.
German migrants to my hometown at that time tended to come from eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey where their ancestors had settled along the Delaware before the revolution. As a result, the group included more farmers and skilled tradesmen, like carpenters. We had only a few yet who were probably direct migrants. They would come in the next decade when the foundry expanded.
It appears that in this farm town on the railroad, just after the civil war, Irish and German in-migrants lived with others, when they could, and had poor, difficult jobs. Ethnic entrepreneurs had appeared to provide the basic necessities of life. In a town with no restaurants, and many men boarding, saloons provided the only warm places laborers could relax and eat.
Within a decade, John Lynch lead the group that organized a Roman Catholic congregation and raised money to buy land for a church. In 1869, there was already a German clergyman, Frederic Wilhelm. Contemporary histories and directories ignored the existence of both, so I don’t know his denomination.
The basic immigrant social structures were there from the start, family and male support groups, provenders of food and pleasures, and churches.
Fifty years later, a foundry recruited colored labor from the Pensacola, Florida area. Almost immediately, a man from South Carolina relocated from a neighboring town to open a pool hall, and, within a few years, men organized Bethel Baptist and AME Zion churches. The one provided male support, the other spiritual succor.
By the time Blacks moved to town, industry had moved west and so had worker housing. When I was in high school in the 1960s, a store in the original colored district advertised Spanish and Mexican foods.
The identity of the immigrants changed in a hundred years, but the structures, physical and social, that served them remained constant. They don’t appear to be unique to specific ethnic groups, but appear as consequences of migration into urban areas. Their durability, no doubt, stabilizes the lives of the dislocated.
If immigrants today are trying to reestablish their families, stay with their churches, patronize ethnic restaurants and groceries, then they are not dangerous to the well being of the commonwealth. Even those who frequent local bars and clubs are less likely to be problems than those who’ve been in the country for decades. Groups trying to establish social structures are not the ones who ignore and destroy them
What I find interesting is not the persistence of conflict, but the durability of social structures of migration in this country. They’ve been documented again and again by sociologists and historians, especially for centers of large scale movement like Boston and New York.
Still, I was surprised to discover them in my midwestern hometown. I have a city directory form 1869, one of those that lists all the heads of households with their addresses and occupations. I entered the 598 names into Excel, made guesses about ethnic origin based on surnames, and sorted them in various ways.
The town directory was about 2% Irish and 3% German a few decades after the mass migrations began with the potato famine and the revolutions of 1848.
My hometown was on the Michigan Central tracks, but the rail yards and shops were concentrated in two cities to the west and one to the east. Besides a small foundry, it had no specialized employment to distinguish it from any other farm market. It had no particular reason to draw immigrant laborers.
Mrs. E. A. Flanigan headed a family living on one of the streets of worker housing that entered the main street through an area of saloons and tobacco shops. Listed with her were two other Flanigan women, Alice and Libby, and a man, Robert. They probably were her children. Michael Flanigan lived in a local hotel.
There was no indication if she was a widow or had been abandoned. She’s the only female household head listed, and it was unusual for the directory to have listed her children. She and the girls were milliners, the resident male was a tinner, and the one in the hotel a shoemaker.
One could speculate on the economic activities of the family. After all, there must have been prostitutes and they lived in the right area. Or, they could be just what they seemed, immigrants struggling to survive doing the tedious, labor-intensive jobs others didn’t want.
Seven women in town were listed as domestics and one as a laundry woman. Two had German surnames, Ann Ballhousen and Caroline Schultz. There were eight other milliners and one woman was a seamstress. 20% to 25% immigrants in these female occupations.
The other Irish household detailed by the city directory was headed by tailor John Lynch. Four other men lived at his address: Patrick Fanning, Daniel Leary, and James Parrish, all laborers, and Patrick Braedon, a tailor. Lynch apparently took in boarders; possibly one was a partner, apprentice or employee.
Their occupations, too, were typical of the drudge work that employed so many men. Most in town were laborers. A few were merchants, including William O’Donoghue, and some were skilled tradesmen, like stone mason Francis Magennis and marble cutter John Kelly.
Edward McNally and Michael O’Donnell were saloon keepers, as were George Schwer, Blanchard Holden and James Wright. Schwer lived near the main crossroads, Wright near the Flanigans, and the others near the railroad.
Bar tenders included August Waldrougel, Henry Foster, Theodore Markle and William Nicolls. They all lived near the main crossroads, two in the hotel there. At that time, most of the people who worked or serviced a hotel had it listed as their address.
German migrants to my hometown at that time tended to come from eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey where their ancestors had settled along the Delaware before the revolution. As a result, the group included more farmers and skilled tradesmen, like carpenters. We had only a few yet who were probably direct migrants. They would come in the next decade when the foundry expanded.
It appears that in this farm town on the railroad, just after the civil war, Irish and German in-migrants lived with others, when they could, and had poor, difficult jobs. Ethnic entrepreneurs had appeared to provide the basic necessities of life. In a town with no restaurants, and many men boarding, saloons provided the only warm places laborers could relax and eat.
Within a decade, John Lynch lead the group that organized a Roman Catholic congregation and raised money to buy land for a church. In 1869, there was already a German clergyman, Frederic Wilhelm. Contemporary histories and directories ignored the existence of both, so I don’t know his denomination.
The basic immigrant social structures were there from the start, family and male support groups, provenders of food and pleasures, and churches.
Fifty years later, a foundry recruited colored labor from the Pensacola, Florida area. Almost immediately, a man from South Carolina relocated from a neighboring town to open a pool hall, and, within a few years, men organized Bethel Baptist and AME Zion churches. The one provided male support, the other spiritual succor.
By the time Blacks moved to town, industry had moved west and so had worker housing. When I was in high school in the 1960s, a store in the original colored district advertised Spanish and Mexican foods.
The identity of the immigrants changed in a hundred years, but the structures, physical and social, that served them remained constant. They don’t appear to be unique to specific ethnic groups, but appear as consequences of migration into urban areas. Their durability, no doubt, stabilizes the lives of the dislocated.
If immigrants today are trying to reestablish their families, stay with their churches, patronize ethnic restaurants and groceries, then they are not dangerous to the well being of the commonwealth. Even those who frequent local bars and clubs are less likely to be problems than those who’ve been in the country for decades. Groups trying to establish social structures are not the ones who ignore and destroy them
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Immigration - Part 2 - Economics
Immigration ranks with communists, now repackaged as Moslems, conspiracies and Negroes as the great bugaboos that can be trotted out whenever voters get restive. Where I work, the effects of rhetorical posturing have been more pernicious.
I work for a contractor who caters to customers willing to pay for quality, or the illusion of success it brings. Most of our workers speak Spanish. We pay painters less than the large, local union shop, but at least twice the federal minimum wage, and considerably more than any homeowner’s willing to pay who hires unlicensed help.
We recently had two customers whose remodeling projects overran their budgets (or loans), and they expected us to complete their work gratis. In both cases, we pulled our crews until payment issues were resolved. One even demanded our cost structure before he would pay, and he’s now refusing to pay the overheads of the general contractor.
I asked a co-worker if this kind of behavior was normal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were: in both cases we had wives who kept demanding more without regard to price, and husbands who found it easier to argue with us than them. Perhaps the men didn’t want to restrain their wives, lest it make them seem less worthy; possibly, they badgered us to dramatize they were as powerful as those they considered their peers.
I was told no, it was unusual, and my co-worker went on to suggest that there may be a hint of racism in the response. The owner’s response one day was that he wasn’t sure he liked catering to "whiney millionaires." The next day, he decided the fault was all his, that he had accepted agreements that were too open ended.
I suspect publicity about immigration fuels our customers’ behavior. Propagandists tell us how much less money immigrants are willing to accept, and talk about cheap labor in the big box parking lots. People who’ve already spent $60,000 to $100,000 to repaint their houses feel they’ve been overcharged, and now want us to complete the work with what they’ve heard are the usual substandard immigrant wages.
If we don’t, and we have not cut pay, then we lose money. In one case, since the couple started protesting, we’ve only been able to bill half our direct costs, and none of our indirect ones. In effect, they cut our price by at least two-thirds. The alternative was strained relations with general contractors, and even larger potential losses.
It’s no different than the downward pressure on wages in this country coming from exporting our manufacturing jobs to México or China. Shareholders and customers are often the ones who force plants that can compete in this country to move, because the mere fact they can succeed threatens the pattern they’ve been told to use to judge merit. We know one of the disputing couples is involved with companies who’ve moved their manufacturing overseas.
At the same time we have customers who want to change the terms of their agreements as their jobs near completion, we’re realizing prices we quoted are no longer high enough. During the months we’ve been sending crews to the two house sites, our material costs have risen, costs to drive to them have increased. Our hourly rate for such time and materials jobs covers both, and we’ve just increased it for future proposals, and have had more customers try to renegotiate high bids.
We’re not yet in the position of homeowners looking for help in the big box parking lots who’ve just spent more than they budgeted for materials, and now have to complete their home improvement as best they can. But, we are getting caught in the same economic vise, where our costs are rising but the market won’t let us increase our income to compensate.
Economists who believe the market follows natural laws constantly tell us, the only element that can be controlled is labor. Materials, transportation, other costs are the implacable outcome of market forces that cannot be altered without harming the market itself. They remind us corporate executives don’t get their high pay from wages, but from market mechanisms through options to buy shares at prices lower than the publically traded value.
Recently, investment bankers have advised people the best defense against escalating costs is to buy stock in the offending companies, and thereby earn a rebate from the same market forces. That advice is only helpful for those with financial reserves. For those who can barely afford a house, and could never afford to hire a painter, the advice is superfluous.
Economics never proffer useful answers to those of us whose wages are the one that always need to be managed to keep the markets stable. As Ben Stein recently wrote in The New York Times,
When experts let us down and the mass media reports news that doesn’t match our experience, pressure builds on politicians. There always are some willing to appease our anxieties by appealing to our basest instincts.
Automobile or airline workers may be cynical about the efficacy of limiting immigration because they know the biggest threat to their wages is outsourcing or the availability of underemployed citizens willing to take their jobs for lower wages that still improve their situations.
The more idealistic, the ones who still believe they can improve their lives, are the ones who may be willing to listen to the pundits. Listening and following advice reinforces their sense they still can control their lives, much the way pressuring my boss provides his customers assurance they are still among the better off, still have accumulated wealth and power.
Historically people have exorcized immigrants when they were concerned about their own economic security. The fact that politicians believe they can now exploit it for personal gain tells us a great deal less about the border and the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the country, than it does about the economy. In a period when inflation measures have been redefined to eliminate destabilizing factors, when the consumer price index does not include food or energy, the willingness to listen to bigots may be the only reliable economic indicator.
Sources:
Stein, Ben. "A Quick Course in the Economics of Confusion," The New York Times, 28 May 2006.
I work for a contractor who caters to customers willing to pay for quality, or the illusion of success it brings. Most of our workers speak Spanish. We pay painters less than the large, local union shop, but at least twice the federal minimum wage, and considerably more than any homeowner’s willing to pay who hires unlicensed help.
We recently had two customers whose remodeling projects overran their budgets (or loans), and they expected us to complete their work gratis. In both cases, we pulled our crews until payment issues were resolved. One even demanded our cost structure before he would pay, and he’s now refusing to pay the overheads of the general contractor.
I asked a co-worker if this kind of behavior was normal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were: in both cases we had wives who kept demanding more without regard to price, and husbands who found it easier to argue with us than them. Perhaps the men didn’t want to restrain their wives, lest it make them seem less worthy; possibly, they badgered us to dramatize they were as powerful as those they considered their peers.
I was told no, it was unusual, and my co-worker went on to suggest that there may be a hint of racism in the response. The owner’s response one day was that he wasn’t sure he liked catering to "whiney millionaires." The next day, he decided the fault was all his, that he had accepted agreements that were too open ended.
I suspect publicity about immigration fuels our customers’ behavior. Propagandists tell us how much less money immigrants are willing to accept, and talk about cheap labor in the big box parking lots. People who’ve already spent $60,000 to $100,000 to repaint their houses feel they’ve been overcharged, and now want us to complete the work with what they’ve heard are the usual substandard immigrant wages.
If we don’t, and we have not cut pay, then we lose money. In one case, since the couple started protesting, we’ve only been able to bill half our direct costs, and none of our indirect ones. In effect, they cut our price by at least two-thirds. The alternative was strained relations with general contractors, and even larger potential losses.
It’s no different than the downward pressure on wages in this country coming from exporting our manufacturing jobs to México or China. Shareholders and customers are often the ones who force plants that can compete in this country to move, because the mere fact they can succeed threatens the pattern they’ve been told to use to judge merit. We know one of the disputing couples is involved with companies who’ve moved their manufacturing overseas.
At the same time we have customers who want to change the terms of their agreements as their jobs near completion, we’re realizing prices we quoted are no longer high enough. During the months we’ve been sending crews to the two house sites, our material costs have risen, costs to drive to them have increased. Our hourly rate for such time and materials jobs covers both, and we’ve just increased it for future proposals, and have had more customers try to renegotiate high bids.
We’re not yet in the position of homeowners looking for help in the big box parking lots who’ve just spent more than they budgeted for materials, and now have to complete their home improvement as best they can. But, we are getting caught in the same economic vise, where our costs are rising but the market won’t let us increase our income to compensate.
Economists who believe the market follows natural laws constantly tell us, the only element that can be controlled is labor. Materials, transportation, other costs are the implacable outcome of market forces that cannot be altered without harming the market itself. They remind us corporate executives don’t get their high pay from wages, but from market mechanisms through options to buy shares at prices lower than the publically traded value.
Recently, investment bankers have advised people the best defense against escalating costs is to buy stock in the offending companies, and thereby earn a rebate from the same market forces. That advice is only helpful for those with financial reserves. For those who can barely afford a house, and could never afford to hire a painter, the advice is superfluous.
Economics never proffer useful answers to those of us whose wages are the one that always need to be managed to keep the markets stable. As Ben Stein recently wrote in The New York Times,
Yes, we do have a very strong economy by many metrics - alas, not including personal hourly income, but that’s for another day.before reiterating, "We have full employment."
When experts let us down and the mass media reports news that doesn’t match our experience, pressure builds on politicians. There always are some willing to appease our anxieties by appealing to our basest instincts.
Automobile or airline workers may be cynical about the efficacy of limiting immigration because they know the biggest threat to their wages is outsourcing or the availability of underemployed citizens willing to take their jobs for lower wages that still improve their situations.
The more idealistic, the ones who still believe they can improve their lives, are the ones who may be willing to listen to the pundits. Listening and following advice reinforces their sense they still can control their lives, much the way pressuring my boss provides his customers assurance they are still among the better off, still have accumulated wealth and power.
Historically people have exorcized immigrants when they were concerned about their own economic security. The fact that politicians believe they can now exploit it for personal gain tells us a great deal less about the border and the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the country, than it does about the economy. In a period when inflation measures have been redefined to eliminate destabilizing factors, when the consumer price index does not include food or energy, the willingness to listen to bigots may be the only reliable economic indicator.
Sources:
Stein, Ben. "A Quick Course in the Economics of Confusion," The New York Times, 28 May 2006.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Immigration - Part 1 - Bad Law
Bad law makes bad citizens. Attempts to control immigration have produced some of our worst laws, with some of the most dire unintended consequences.
I read one reason the Japanese were willing to attack us at Pearl Harbor was they resented our discriminatory immigration laws which were aimed specifically at Japanese and Chinese in California. I don’t remember the source, and so don’t know what evidence, if any, supports that claim.
Certainly prohibition resulted, in part, from our desire to control our German- and Italian-speaking residents, especially during World War I. It was proposed in 1917, and ratified in 1919.
Despite its noble hopes to curb alcohol abuse, it fed, instead, a popular culture that glamorized cocktails, and spread drinking to the middle classes, including women. Since the new drinkers weren’t alcoholics, they didn’t believe their desires for chic social lives were corrupt. This lead to a willingness to circumvent the law, indeed, romanticized speakeasies and bootleggers by reinforcing youth’s natural desire to challenge restraints.
Selective obedience of the law was simultaneously occurring with the federal income tax and state attempts to control the newly available automobiles. Attitudes coalesced into a new view that our government was a system to be outsmarted.
Prohibition created a black market supplied, initially, by men who had previously controlled vice traffic in cities. They expanded into gangs, and then syndicates, and what we now refer to as the mafia.
As activities of rumrunners became more flagrant and led to gang wars, we responded with increased police power, and introduced what became the FBI. It, in turn, found it difficult to collect evidence of criminal behavior, and so found ways to twist the new income tax laws to find grounds to arrest criminals.
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but too late to curb the lawlessness and the acceptance of lawlessness that it had engendered, especially lawlessness by the state. Those attitudes continue today when we jail users and escalate the force used against farmers, now to the point of dominating our policies towards some Latin American countries.
The consequences of criminalizing natural human behavior, especially when that involves the marketplace, comes to mind when politicians suggest ways to stop immigration should include turning undocumented immigrants into felons and prosecuting those who help them, wither it be with food, housing, or a job.
Attempts to slow immigration have already lead to a new class of criminals, the coyotes who charge to bring people into the country, then leave them to die in unventilated trucks or in the desert. A recent New York Times article described other exploiters, including unscrupulous lawyers.
The requirement that job applicants must show proof of citizenship already puts many in law enforcement positions for which they are not trained and makes all of us prove our legitimacy. I work for a contractor who leases his employees from a head shop that handles payroll and other legal requirements. I send copies of the documents applicants provide to the legal employer.
I have no idea how to tell if a driver’s license or social security card is counterfeit, and I doubt the employer can make any determination from the copies sent to it. I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to check anything, or am only a clerk. The worst of the proposed laws would prosecute me.
Some may respond to the threat of legal action by simply refusing to hire anyone who looks like he or she may be an immigrant, regardless of proof. That puts them in violation of civil rights laws against discrimination based on skin color, language or national origins.
Which law to break to run a business and hire people?
A government of laws depends on citizens accepting the laws it promulgates, and obeying them, regardless of cost or inconvenience. Selective obedience of the law has an honorable tradition going back to Thoreau, if not to earlier religious groups. However, our government has only tolerated it when the issues were ones of genuine conscience, like wartime conscientious objectors, or small religious groups like the Amish.
Every time I’m forced by economic necessity to do something that could be illegal, it makes me ruminate on the nature of the law and our government. The corruption of the body politic is no longer something happening to them, to politicians and lobbyists. When it touches a lowly clerk in a small business who dutifully votes in primaries, then it is forcing every single person not to consider the status of immigrants, but to reconsider their loyalty to their elected government.
It was hard to elevate drinking by our mothers and grandmothers to that level; it will be harder still to indict people trying to run legitimate businesses. The resulting, selective application of law enforcement will lead to a further degradation of our respect for laws and the individuals who uphold or enforce them. The contempt for law is far more corrosive for the American way of life, than the challenge of absorbing one more wave of immigrants.
Sources:
Gary Rivlin, "Dollars and Dreams: Immigrants as Prey," The New York Times, 11 June 2006.
I read one reason the Japanese were willing to attack us at Pearl Harbor was they resented our discriminatory immigration laws which were aimed specifically at Japanese and Chinese in California. I don’t remember the source, and so don’t know what evidence, if any, supports that claim.
Certainly prohibition resulted, in part, from our desire to control our German- and Italian-speaking residents, especially during World War I. It was proposed in 1917, and ratified in 1919.
Despite its noble hopes to curb alcohol abuse, it fed, instead, a popular culture that glamorized cocktails, and spread drinking to the middle classes, including women. Since the new drinkers weren’t alcoholics, they didn’t believe their desires for chic social lives were corrupt. This lead to a willingness to circumvent the law, indeed, romanticized speakeasies and bootleggers by reinforcing youth’s natural desire to challenge restraints.
Selective obedience of the law was simultaneously occurring with the federal income tax and state attempts to control the newly available automobiles. Attitudes coalesced into a new view that our government was a system to be outsmarted.
Prohibition created a black market supplied, initially, by men who had previously controlled vice traffic in cities. They expanded into gangs, and then syndicates, and what we now refer to as the mafia.
As activities of rumrunners became more flagrant and led to gang wars, we responded with increased police power, and introduced what became the FBI. It, in turn, found it difficult to collect evidence of criminal behavior, and so found ways to twist the new income tax laws to find grounds to arrest criminals.
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but too late to curb the lawlessness and the acceptance of lawlessness that it had engendered, especially lawlessness by the state. Those attitudes continue today when we jail users and escalate the force used against farmers, now to the point of dominating our policies towards some Latin American countries.
The consequences of criminalizing natural human behavior, especially when that involves the marketplace, comes to mind when politicians suggest ways to stop immigration should include turning undocumented immigrants into felons and prosecuting those who help them, wither it be with food, housing, or a job.
Attempts to slow immigration have already lead to a new class of criminals, the coyotes who charge to bring people into the country, then leave them to die in unventilated trucks or in the desert. A recent New York Times article described other exploiters, including unscrupulous lawyers.
The requirement that job applicants must show proof of citizenship already puts many in law enforcement positions for which they are not trained and makes all of us prove our legitimacy. I work for a contractor who leases his employees from a head shop that handles payroll and other legal requirements. I send copies of the documents applicants provide to the legal employer.
I have no idea how to tell if a driver’s license or social security card is counterfeit, and I doubt the employer can make any determination from the copies sent to it. I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to check anything, or am only a clerk. The worst of the proposed laws would prosecute me.
Some may respond to the threat of legal action by simply refusing to hire anyone who looks like he or she may be an immigrant, regardless of proof. That puts them in violation of civil rights laws against discrimination based on skin color, language or national origins.
Which law to break to run a business and hire people?
A government of laws depends on citizens accepting the laws it promulgates, and obeying them, regardless of cost or inconvenience. Selective obedience of the law has an honorable tradition going back to Thoreau, if not to earlier religious groups. However, our government has only tolerated it when the issues were ones of genuine conscience, like wartime conscientious objectors, or small religious groups like the Amish.
Every time I’m forced by economic necessity to do something that could be illegal, it makes me ruminate on the nature of the law and our government. The corruption of the body politic is no longer something happening to them, to politicians and lobbyists. When it touches a lowly clerk in a small business who dutifully votes in primaries, then it is forcing every single person not to consider the status of immigrants, but to reconsider their loyalty to their elected government.
It was hard to elevate drinking by our mothers and grandmothers to that level; it will be harder still to indict people trying to run legitimate businesses. The resulting, selective application of law enforcement will lead to a further degradation of our respect for laws and the individuals who uphold or enforce them. The contempt for law is far more corrosive for the American way of life, than the challenge of absorbing one more wave of immigrants.
Sources:
Gary Rivlin, "Dollars and Dreams: Immigrants as Prey," The New York Times, 11 June 2006.
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